Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
As cloud-based computing becomes more prevalent, cloud services may become cheaper and more available. In some cases, cloud-based service applications may be built upon other cloud services or platforms. Such service-based cloud architectures may provide a flexible tool for quickly building powerful datacenter applications. Together with certification of cloud services, service-based architectures may allow automated discovery and building of business process services that accomplish complex goals while maintaining desired standards. Cloud service certification may use certificates to establish compliance of individual service elements with various rules, standards, and practices. These certificates may typically be confirmed by exposing the certifications of the lower-level sub-services that support the top-level application to the application customer. For example, if a particular storage service underlies the application, the specific certificate for that particular storage service may be revealed to the customer. This means that anyone who uses a service may know all the sub-services used to build a top level service.